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1. THE PECULIARITIES OF THE FIRST PERIOD

The absence of hard facts is particularly marked for the first period. One, and only one, date is really certain and that is the rule of the emperor Aśoka (274—236 BC) whose patronage transformed Buddhism from a small sect of ascetics into an all-Indian religion.

Even the date of the Buddha’s life is a matter of conjecture. Indian tradition often tells us that His death took place 100 years before Aśoka. Modern scholars have on the whole agreed to place His life between 563 and 483 BC. With some reluctance I have here followed their chronology.

The nature of our documents gives rise to further uncertainties. During this entire period the Scriptures were transmitted orally and they were written down only towards the end of it. Of the actual words of the Buddha nothing is left. The Buddha may have taught in Ardhamagadhi, but none of His sayings is preserved in its original form. As for the earliest Canon, even its language is still a matter of dispute. All we have are translations of what may have been the early Canon into other Indian languages, chiefly Pāli and a particular form of Buddhist Sanskrit.

Always without a central organization, Buddhism had divided itself at some unspecified time into a number of sects, of which usually eighteen are counted. Most of these sects had their own Canon. Nearly all of them are lost to us, either because they were never written down, or because the depredations of time have destroyed the written record. Only those are left which after the collapse of Buddhism in India about AD 1200 had by some chance got into some region outside India, like Ceylon, Nepal, or Central Asia, or which had been previously translated into Chinese or Tibetan. We therefore possess only a small portion of what actually circulated in the Buddhist community during the first period. What is more, the selection of what is preserved is due more to chance than considerations of antiquity and intrinsic merit.

And that which we have may have been composed at any time during the first five hundred years. First of all it must be stated quite clearly that there is no objective criterion which would allow us to single out those elements in the record which go back to the Buddha Himself. Some modern European books abound in confident assertions about what the Buddha Himself has personally taught. They are all mere guesswork. The “original gospel” is beyond our ken now. The farthest we can get back in time is the period when the community split up into separate sects.

What we can do is to compare the documents of the various sects, say a Theravadin Dhammapāda from Ceylon with a Sarvastivadin Udānavarga found in the sands of Turkestan. Where we find passages in which these two texts, the one in Pali and the other in Sanskrit, agree word by word, we can assume that they belong to a time antedating the separation of the two schools, which took place during Aśoka’s rule. Where they do not agree, we may infer their post-Aśokan date in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

So far no one has yet systematically undertaken such a comparison and until that is done we are unable to clearly distinguish the doctrines of the first one or two centuries, from those of post Aśokan times. It is not even quite certain when and under what circumstances these separations of the sects took place, since all the works we have on the subject are five centuries later than the events they report and the data are everywhere distorted by sectarian bias.

But whether our knowledge gets us to within one century of the neighbourhood of the Nirvāṇa, or to within two or three centuries only, there is an initial period which is shrouded in mystery and to which we cannot penetrate.

In the next two sections I will try to explain the doctrines which marked the Buddhism of the first period as far as it can be inferred with some probability. They first concern monastic discipline, and then the basic theory of salvation and the way to it.

2. THE MONASTIC DISCIPLINE

The two oldest documents which we can place with some degree of certainty before Aśoka happen to deal with monastic discipline (Vinaya). From fairly early times onwards the traditions concerning the Buddha’s teachings were grouped under two principal headings called respectively Dharma and Vinaya. The Vinaya proved the more stable and uniform element of the two, much less subject to disagreements and re-formulations. Discussions on the Vinaya are seldom heard of and even at later times school formations rarely implied modifications in the Vinaya, except in quite external and superficial matters, such as dress, etc. Even when with the Mahāyana quite new schools arose on dogmatic grounds, they adhered for a long time as far as the Vinaya was concerned to one of the older Hinayana schools.

In actual practice there has been, of course, much plain disregard of the more onerous rules in the long history of the order, but as for their formulation it seems to have reached its final form already in the fourth century BC.

At that time a great work, the Skandhaka, was produced, which divided and arranged the enormous material accumulated by then according to a well conceived plan. It regulates the fundamental institutions of Buddhist monastic life, the admission to the order, the confession ceremonies, the retirement during the rainy season, and it discusses clothing, food and drugs for the sick, as well as the rules to be observed in the punishment of offenders.

Older still are the approximately two hundred and fifty rules of the Prātimoksha, a classification of ecclesiastical offences, of which we possess about a dozen different recensions, which agree on all essentials. These rules must be recited every fortnight in front of a chapter of the monks. Among all the texts of the Scriptures there is none that has enjoyed among Buddhists an authority as uncontested, widespread and lasting as these Pratimoksha rules, and it is therefore necessary to give the reader some idea of their contents.

First of all they list four offences which deserve expulsion, i.e. sexual intercourse, theft, murder, and the false claim to either supernatural powers or high spiritual attainments. Then follow thirteen lighter offences, which deserve suspension, and of which five concern sexual misconduct, two the building of huts, and the remaining six dissensions within the Order. The recitation then continues to enumerate two sexual offences which are “punishable according to the circumstances”, and after that come thirty offences which “involve forfeiture” of the right to share in garments belonging to the Order and which, in addition, make the offender liable to an unfavourable rebirth. They forbid, among other things, the handling of gold and silver, as well as trading activities, or the personal appropriation of goods intended for the community. Next there are ninety offences which, unless repented and expiated, will be punished by an unfavourable rebirth. They concern such things as telling lies, belittling or slandering other monks, they regulate the relations with the laity by forbidding “to teach the Scriptures word by word to an unordained person”, to tell laymen about the offences committed by monks, and so on. For the rest they concern a huge variety of misdemeanours, e.g. they forbid to destroy any kind of vegetation, to dig the earth, to drink alcoholic beverages, or to have a chair or bed made with legs higher than eight inches. The obviously very archaic document then further gives four offences requiring confession, followed by thirteen rules of decorum, and it concludes with seven rules for the settling of disputes.

The purpose of the Vinaya rules was to provide ideal conditions for meditation and renunciation. They try to enforce a complete withdrawal from social life, a separation from its interests and worries, and the rupture of all ties with family or clan. At the same time the insistence on extreme simplicity and frugality was meant to ensure independence, while the giving up of home and all property was intended to foster non-attachment.

Originally, the Order seems to have been conceived as composed of wandering beggars, who ate food obtained as alms in their begging bowls, wore clothes made from rags picked up on rubbish heaps and dwelt in the forest, in caves or at the foot of trees. Only during the rainy season must they cease roaming about and stay in one and the same place. At all times a minority continued to aspire after the rigours of this primitive simplicity, but, generally speaking, with the increasing prosperity of the religion the monks settled down in monasteries which gave aloofness from social concerns without some of the inconveniences of the hand-to-mouth existence originally envisaged.

The text of the Vinaya being fixed once and for all, its further history is one of constant compromises between its sacrosanct provisions on the one hand, and social realities and human fallibility on the other.

3. THE BASIC DOCTRINES

So much about the practices of the monks. What then were the doctrines common to all the Buddhists of the first period, and shared not only by them but by all later Buddhists however much they might modify them by additions and reservations?

They can be grouped under two main headings. They first of all propound a theory of salvation, showing the need for it, its nature and the methods necessary to attain it. They secondly concern the three "Jewels" or "Treasures", i.e. the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sańgha.

In its core, Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation. The need for it arises from the hopelessly unsatisfactory character of the world in which we find ourselves. Buddhists take an extremely gloomy view of the conditions in which we have the misfortune to live. It is particularly the impermanence of everything in and around us that suggests the worthlessness of our worldly aspirations which in the nature of things can never lead to any lasting achievement or abiding satisfaction. In the end death takes away everything we managed to pile up and parts us from everything we cherished.

How futile is the search for security in such surroundings, for happiness with such unsuitable materials! The joys and pleasures of the children of the world are exceedingly trivial and their choices and preferences betray little wisdom. They behave rather like the small child who finds a marble of exceeding beauty with a green spot on it, is overjoyed at having found it, and who, so as to make quite sure of not losing it again, proceeds straightaway to swallow the marble, with the result that his stomach has to be pumped out.

Further, who would not be frightened if he realized all the pains and terrors to which he exposes himself by having a body! Suffering without end in a futile round of rebirths after rebirths (samsāra), that is the lot of ordinary people and the revulsion from it is the spur to salvation. The Buddhist ascetics were men who in fear of birth and death had left home life to gain salvation.

If next we ask for the cause of this unsatisfactory state of affairs, we are told that it is not imposed upon us by any outside force, by some fate or malevolent deity, but that it is due to some factor in our own mental constitution. This factor is variously described as “craving”, the “belief in a separate self, “ignorance” or adherence to the “perverted views”.

Not only the craving for sense-pleasures, for money, social position or power is apt to put us in bondage to the forces which we vainly hope to use for our own ends, but any form of desire whatsoever is condemned by Buddhists as destructive of our inward freedom and independence.

From another angle we may say that the whole of our unhappiness stems from the habit of trying to appropriate some part of the universe as if it were our “own” and to say of as many things as we can that “This is mine, I am this, This is myself."

It is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism that this word “self” does not correspond to a real fact, that the self is fictitious and that therefore by our self-seeking we sacrifice our true welfare to a mere fiction.

Finally, Buddhism differs from Christianity in that it sees the root cause of all evil in “ignorance” and not in “sin”, in an act of intellectual misapprehension and not in an act of volition and rebellion.

As a working definition of ignorance we are offered the four “perverted views” (viparyāsa) which make us seek for permanence in what is inherently impermanent, ease in what is inseparable from suffering, selfhood in what is not linked to any self, and delight in what is essentially repulsive and disgusting.

The situation would, of course, be entirely hopeless if this world of suffering and Samsara comprised the whole extent of reality. In fact this is not so, and beyond it there is something else, which is called Nirvāṇa, a transcendental state which is quite beyond the ken of ordinary experience, and of which nothing can be said except that in it all ills have ceased, together with their causes and consequences.

Buddhists are less intent on defining this Nirvāṇa, than on realizing it within themselves. And they are very much averse to making positive statements about the man who has gone to Nirvāṇa. This world is often compared to a house on fire, which everyone in his senses will try to escape from. But if the samsaric world is like a fire, then Nirvāṇa is like the state which results from the extinction of that fire. As we read in the Sutta Nipāta (1074, 1079), one of our more ancient texts:

As flame flung on by force of wind
Comes to its end, reaches what none can sum;
the silent sage, released,
From name-and-form, goes to the goal,
Reaches the state that none can sum.
When all conditions are removed.
All ways of telling also are removed.

Since the causes of all evil lie within ourselves, we ourselves can, by our own efforts, rid ourselves of them, if we only know how to go about it. Like a good physician the Buddha has given us a profusion of remedies for the great variety of our ailments.

On their lower levels the Buddhist methods of salvation are similar to those found in other religions. A man must first of all bring some morality into his daily life, and he must observe the “five precepts” which forbid killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and the use of intoxicants. Next he must take care how he earns his living. Butchers, fishermen, or soldiers, for instance, break the first precept all the time, and little spirituality can be expected of them. Other occupations are less perilous to the soul, but the safest and most fruitful is that of a homeless and propertyless monk who relies on others for all his material needs.

But once the moral foundations are laid, the remainder of the Buddhist efforts consist in mental training, in meditations of various kinds.

Meditation is a mental training which is carried out for three distinct, but interconnected, purposes:

1. It aims at a withdrawal of attention from its normal pre-occupation with constantly changing sensory stimuli and ideas centred on oneself.

2. It aims at effecting a shift of attention from the sensory world to another, subtler realm, thereby calming the turmoils of the mind. Sense-based knowledge is as inherently unsatisfactory as a sense-based life. Sensory and historical facts as such are uncertain, unfruitful, trivial, and largely a matter of indifference. Only that is worth knowing which is discovered in meditation, when the doors of the senses are closed. The truths of this holy religion must elude the average worldling with his sense-based knowledge, and his sense-bounded horizon.

3. It aims at penetrating into the suprasensory reality itself, at roaming about among the transcendental facts, and this quest leads it to Emptiness as the one ultimate reality.

In Buddhist terminology, the first preliminary step is known as “mindfulness’ (smŗti), which is followed then by “ecstatic trance” (samādhi) and “wisdom” (prajñā). The relation of the three is indicated by the following diagram:

Mindfulness
A
Calming down Insight
B C
Ecstatic Wisdom
An objectless inwardness An unsubstantial emptiness
Nirvāṇa

This is the classification of the meditations according to their purpose. From another point of view they can be classified according to their subjects or topics. A considerable number of such topics were offered to the aspirant, and his choice among them depends on his mental endowments and proclivities. So vast is the range of the possibilities offered that they cannot possibly be even enumerated here.

There we have relatively simple breathing exercises of the Yogic type, a survey of the “thirty-two parts of the body”, the contemplation of corpses in various degrees of decomposition, an introspective awareness of our mental processes as they go along, be they feelings, thoughts, or the hindrances to concentration, or the factors which make for enlightenment. Then there is the cultivation of the social emotions, such as friendliness and compassion, the recollection of the virtues of the three Jewels, the meditation on death and the aspiration for Nirvāṇa. A favourite subject of meditation are the twelve links of the chain of conditioned co-production (pratyaya- samutpādā)., which shows how ignorance leads to the other factors of worldly existence ending in old age and death and how, conversely, the extinction of ignorance must lead to the extinction of all these factors. Other meditations again try to impress on our minds the facts of the impermanence of all conditioned things, to show up the full extent of suffering, demonstrate the inanity of the term “self”, to foster insight into emptiness and to reveal the characteristic features of the path which leads to salvation.

In fact, there seems to be almost no limit to the number of meditational devices which are attested for the first period of Buddhism, although it was apparently only in the second period that some systematic order was imposed upon them.

Now as to the Three Jewels, the Buddha is essential to this religion as its founder who guarantees the truth and reliability of the teaching by the fact that He is “fully enlightened”. He has awoken to the nature and meaning of life and has found a definite way out of it. He differs from all other people in that He has by Himself found the truth, and that He knows everything that is necessary to salvation. Whether He knew also all other things, i.e. whether he was omniscient in the full sense of the term, was a matter of dispute among the sects. There was, however, general agreement that He knew everything needful for the attainment of final peace and that therefore He could in spiritual matters act as a sure and infallible guide.

The word “Buddha” itself is, of course, not a proper name, but a title, or epithet, which means the “Enlightened One”. It refers to the condition of a man who was a completely unobstructed channel for the spiritual force of Dharma, or Reality itself. The personal name of the historical Buddha was Gautama, or Siddhartha, and after His tribe He is often called Sakyamuni, “the sage from the tribe of the Sakyas”. With the historical individual the Buddhist religion is not greatly concerned. His value to the religion lay in His transmission of the spiritual teachings about Dharma. A duality of this kind is normal in authoritative Asian religious leaders. In recent years we have met it again in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who at the same time was the Mahatma, the “Great-souled One”, a word for the spiritual force which worked through that particular individual.

In this way the individual, called Gautama or Sakyamuni, somehow coexists with the spiritual principle of Buddhahood, which is variously called the “Tathagata”, or “the Dharma-body” or “the Buddha-nature”. The Buddhists have, however, always maintained that the exact relation between His individual and His spiritual sides cannot be defined. They have also consistently opposed the tendencies of the unregenerate to put their faith into a living actual person and have done everything to belittle the importance of the Buddha’s actual physical existence. It is the Buddha Himself who is reported to have said to Vakkali: “What is there, Vakkali, in seeing this vile body of mine? Whoso sees the spiritual Law, or Dharma, he sees me; whoso sees me sees the spiritual Dharma. Seeing Dharma, Vakkali, he sees me; seeing me, he sees Dharma.”

As the manifestation of a type, the “historical Buddha” is not an isolated phenomenon, but one of a series of Buddhas who appear in this world throughout the ages. Knowledge of the non-historical Buddhas seems to have grown as time went on. Originally there were seven, then we hear of twenty-four, and so the number steadily increased. The “seven Buddhas”, i.e. Sakyamuni and His six predecessors, are frequently represented in art - in Bharhut and Sanchi by Their stupas and Bodhi-trees, in Gandhara, Mathura and Ajanta during our second period in human form, each nearly indistinguishable from the other.

It was only towards the end of the first period that interest shifted to two other non-historical Buddhas. With the development of the Bodhisattva-theory (see ch. II sec. 1) comes Dīpaṃkara, Sakyamuni’s twenty-fourth predecessor, under whom He first resolved to become a Buddha. With the spread of pessimism about the continued vitality of Sakyamuni’s message comes the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha, under whom the Dharma will reappear with new vigour.

This period had little interest in the biography of the Buddha Sakyamuni as a person. It would be difficult to reconstruct the facts of His life from the details we have. Interest concentrated on the two periods of His life which had the greatest significance for the believer, i.e. to the period of His enlightenment which marked His victory over ignorance, and to His last days , when He attained His final Nirvāṇa, and consummated His victory over death and the world. For the rest it appears that the greater part of what we believe to know of His life was at first a part of the Vinaya tradition, that it consisted of an account which began with His genealogy and miraculous birth, and went on beyond His final Nirvāṇa to the legendary first Council of Raja-gṛha where the Canon of the Sacred Scriptures is said to have been compiled, and ended with the so-called second council of Vaiśāli where controversial points of disciplinary practice were discussed.

The story of His life was at first a collection of precedents, which were invoked to justify the Vinaya rules. In addition, many stories and legends gradually grew up in connection with some holy place or shrine, to account for its sanctity. Little attempt was made to weave all these stories into one consecutive biography. At present we are not in a position to decide which ones of them are trustworthy historical information and which ones are the pious inventions of a later age. Nothing was in any case more alien to the mentality of the monks of this first period than to make such distinctions between these two orders of facts.

Our description of the Buddha would be incomplete if we failed to mention that alone among mortals of His age He had in addition to His normal physical body, as it appeared to common people, still a kind of “ethereal” body, which only the elect could see with the eye of faith and which Buddhist art tried to reproduce to the best of its abilities. The “ethereal” body is sixteen feet high, and it possesses the thirty-two “marks of the superman”. For instance, the Buddhas have wheels engraved on Their feet, webs between Their fingers, a cowl on Their heads, a halo and an aureole round Their heads and bodies, a tuft of white curly hair between Their eyebrows, and so on and so on. In the form in which we have it, this tradition is obviously post-Aśokan. Parts of it may, however, go back much further, to ancient and even pre-Buddhist traditions about manly beauty, and to the age-old art of predicting a person’s destiny, nature and future from such signs and prognostics.

A Buddha’s body differs from that of other people not only by the possession of the thirty-two marks, but in addition it has the peculiar property that its bony parts are indestructible. At the cremation of the Buddha Sakyamuni they were not reduced to ashes, and they formed the relics which were distributed among the believers, and were preserved from generation to generation, like the Buddha’s tooth now in Kandy.

Dharma, the second of these Treasures, comprises all the mysteries of the Buddhist faith, and cannot easily be explained in a few words. Buddhists in Asia normally did not describe themselves as “Buddhists”, but as “followers of the Dharma”. This “Dharma” is the name for an impersonal spiritual force behind and in everything. Being spiritual and not of this world, it is rather elusive and not easy to define or get hold of. Judged by logical standards the word is extremely ambiguous. But since the Dharma is the subject-matter of all Buddhist teachings, it is necessary to list its main meanings, and to show their interconnection:

1. First of all it is a word for the one ultimate reality. One spiritual reality underlies all that we perceive in and around us. It is real as contrasted with the illusory things of the commonsense world, to it we should turn as we should turn away from them, for it alone brings true satisfaction. And it is not external to worldly things and events, but in some ways immanent to them, and the directing Law within them.

2. Secondly, by an easy transition, it means that ultimate reality as interpreted or stated in the Buddha’s teaching, and in this subjective form it means “Doctrine”, “Scripture”, or “Truth”.

3. Thirdly, Dharma, in both the first and second sense, may be reflected in our lives, may manifest itself in our actions, insofar as we act in accordance with it. The word thus assumes the meaning of “righteousness” and “virtue”.

4. It is in its fourth sense that the word becomes rather subtle and assumes a meaning which constitutes the specific contribution of Buddhist thought, containing at the same time within it all the tensions that have caused it to develop. Buddhist writings everywhere are replete with references to “dharmas” in the plural and they become unintelligible unless the specific meaning of this term is appreciated. The word is here used in a scientific sense, which results from considering things and events in their relation to the Dharma in sense 1, i.e. from studying them as they are in their own ultimate reality. Nearly all scientific and philosophical systems agree in rejecting the appearance of the commonsense world as a false artificial construction, replacing it by an explanation of events based on intelligible entities of various kinds. The most obvious example is the atomic system. Behind the sensory appearance of the material world this system postulates another world, composed of atoms, fairly invisible and adequately grasped only by mathematical formulas. These atoms are that which is physically really there, a thorough understanding of their behaviour allows us to control the physical universe, and we can deduce from them the physical properties of things which our senses perceive. Likewise, the Buddhists assume that our common-sense view of the world is hopelessly distorted by ignorance and craving, and that neither the units into which we divide it, i.e. the “things” we believe to perceive, nor the connections we postulate between them, have much validity. What are “atoms” to the modern physicists, are the “dharmas” to the Buddhists.

A systematic classification of all dharmas had to wait for the second period, just as in this matter of atoms a long time passed between their initial conception by Demokritos and their more precise study by Mendeleyev and Bohr. What we have in this period are various numerical lists of dharmas - such as the five “skandhas”, i.e. form, feelings, perceptions, volitional impulses and consciousness, which were said to constitute the whole range of a human personality. Or the six external and internal sense-fields, i.e. eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch-organ and mind, as well as sight objects, sound-, smell-, taste-, touch- and mind-objects, which constitute the whole range of our possible experience. A “dharma” is an impersonal event, which belongs to no person or individual, but just goes along on its own objective way. It was regarded as a most praiseworthy achievement on the part of a Buddhist monk if he succeeded in accounting to himself for the contents of his mind with the help of these impersonal dharmas, of which tradition provided him with definite lists, without ever bringing in the nebulous and pernicious word “I”. No other religion has included anything like this in the mental training of its adherents and the originality of Buddhism is to be found largely in what it has to say about these elusive dharmas.

With regard to the Sańgha, or “community”, a visible and an invisible Church are distinguished. The visible community consists first of all of the monks and nuns, and then in a wider sense it also comprises the laymen and laywomen who support the monks, have taken their refuge with the three Jewels, and promise to observe the five precepts. Within this community a small elite constituted the true Sańgha.

The wearing of the yellow robe merely shows that a man had exceptionally fine opportunities for spiritual attainment, but it does not render his spiritual success absolutely certain. As for the laymen, their status in the community was a most uncertain one, and for many of the monks they seemed to carry almost no weight at all.

The true Sańgha, the invisible Church, consisted of the Aryas, the “noble” or “holy”ones, men who were contrasted with the common worldlings, also known as the “foolish common people” (bala-prthag-jana).

The difference between these two classes of persons is fundamental to Buddhist theory. They are held to occupy two distinct planes of existence, respectively known as the “worldly” and the “supramundane”. The saints alone are truly alive, while the worldlings just vegetate along in a sort of dull and aimless bewilderment.

Not content with being born in the normal way, the saints have undergone a spiritual rebirth, which is technically known as “winning the Path”. In other words, they have detached themselves from conditioned things to such an extent that they can now effectively turn to the Path which leads to Nirvāṇa. The worldling’s vision of Nirvāṇa is obstructed by the things of the world which he takes far too seriously. Through prolonged meditation he can, however, reach a state where each time a worldly object rises up in front of him, he rejects it wholeheartedly as a mere hindrance, or nuisance. Once this aversion has become an ingrained habit, he can at last take Nirvāṇa, the Unconditioned, for his object. Then “he ceases to belong to the common people”, he “becomes one of the family of the Aryans”. Thereafter he is less and less impelled by the motives of ordinary people, i.e. by motives which are a compound of self-interest and a misguided belief in the reality of sensory things and which contain a strong dosage of greed, hate, and delusion. The contrast with the vision of Nirvāṇa reveals the insignificance and triviality of all these worldly concerns and Nirvāṇa itself increasingly becomes the motivating force behind whatever is done.

Four kinds of saints are normally distinguished. The lowest is called a “Streamwinner”, to indicate that he has won contact with the Path which leads to the Unconditioned. The saints are characteristically disting-uished by the number of times they have to return to this world after death - the first kind must come back seven times at the most, the second only once, and the fourth, the Arhat, the finest and final product of this training, need never come back at all. The true Sańgha is the community of all these saints, but the Arhats are those most highly prized.

4. THE SECTS AND THEIR DISPUTES

The Buddhist community did not remain united for long and soon fell apart into a number of sects. Indian Buddhist tradition generally speaks of “eighteen” such sects, but that is a mere traditional number and in fact more than thirty are known to us, at least by name. The Buddha appointed no successor and Buddhism has never known a central authority like that of the Pope or the Khalif. As different communities fixed themselves in different parts of India, local traditions developed, though in spite of all geographical and doctrinal divisions the different sects generally speaking remained in constant communion with each other.

Not only did individual monks constantly travel from one centre to another, but the institution of regular pilgrimages of masses of monks and laymen to the holy places of Magadha, which were hallowed by the life of the Buddha and by the relics of His body, caused a constant intermingling of the most diverse elements. The problems which the sects discussed remained thus roughly the same for all and so were the assumptions on which the solutions were based.

Through constant contact all Buddhists thus remained mutually intelligible. The different sects tended to have their own organization and Scriptures. In many monasteries members of different sects nevertheless lived together in perfect amity, it was generally recognized that the goal may be reached by different roads and the sects showed great tolerance to each other, although occasional sharp religious invective was of course not entirely unknown. They all shared one common Dharma, although it is important to realize that the verbal formulation of this Dharma did not exist in a brief, handy and unambiguous form. It was transmitted orally, to prevent it from reaching those unfit to receive it, but there was so much of it that no one person could keep it all in mind. In consequence different parts of the scriptures were handed to specialists who knew by heart, say, the Vinaya or the Sutras, or a part of the Sutras, or the Abhidharma, and so on. The reciters of each part of the Scriptures formed separate corporations with privileges of their own and their very existence would add to the divisions within the Order.

Nor must we forget that this Order, however much it might resent the fact, was not a self-contained entity, but had to co-exist with laymen on whom it was economically dependent. There was thus a constant tension between those who regarded the Dharma as a means for the production of a small elite of Arhats living in monastic seclusion in strict observation of the Vinaya rules, and those who wished to increase the chances of salvation for the ordinary people, while combating the authority of the Arhats and working for a relaxation of the monastic precepts.

Finally we must mention philosophy as one of the most potent causes of sectarian divisions. It is not difficult to see why philosophy should have played a decisive role in the development of Buddhism. Salvation on its higher levels was made dependent on the meditational awareness of the actual facts governing our mental processes. In the course of carrying out these meditations, the monks came up against problems which everywhere form the field of philosophy, such as the nature and classification of knowledge, the problems of causality, of time and space, of the criteria of reality, of the existence or non-existence of a “self” and so on. Now it is a fact of observation that philosophy differs from all other branches of knowledge in that it allows of more than one solution to each problem. It is in the nature of things that the differences of opinion should have multiplied the more the Buddhists went into the philosophical impli-cations of their doctrine.

It would be clearly impossible here to enumerate the literally hundreds of points of dispute among the Buddhists, or even to give an account of all the sects. It will be sufficient to say a few words about the four or five chief sects, and leave the sub-sects to look after themselves. The following diagram shows the affiliations between the main branches of the Order:

140 AN3 (= 340BC?)
Mahāsānghikas Sthavirās
200 AN (= 280BC?)
Pudgalavādin
236 AN (=244BC?)
Vibhajyavādins Sarvastivādin

The first schism, between Mahāsānghikas and Sthavirās, was occasioned by the question of the status of the Arhats. A teacher by the name of Mahādeva arose, who claimed that in five points the Arhats fell short of the god-like stature which some sectionsof the community attributed to them. They could, among other things, have seminal emissions in their sleep, and that fact, so he argued, indicated that they are still subject to the influence of demonic deities who appear to them in their dreams. They are also still subject to doubts, ignorant of many things, and owe their salvation to the guidance of others. His thesis led to a dispute in which the majority took the side of Mahādeva, whose school in consequence called themselves the Mahāsānghikas.

His adversaries took the name of Sthavirās, “the Elders”, claiming greater seniority and orthodoxy.

The Mahāsānghikas continued to exist in India until the end and important doctrinal developments took place within their midst. All these were ultimately determined by their decision to take the side of the people against the saints, thus becoming the channel through which popular aspirations entered into Buddhism.

Their most important theories concern Buddhology and philosophical theory. As for the Buddha, they regarded everything personal, earthly, temporal and historical as outside the real Buddha, Who was transcendental, altogether supramun-dane, had no imperfections and impurities whatsoever, was omniscient, all-powerful, infinite and eternal, forever withdrawn into trance, never distracted or asleep. In this way the Buddha became an ideal object of religious faith. As for the historical Buddha, He was a magical creation of the transcendental Buddha, a fictitious creature sent by Him to appear in the world and to teach its inhabitants.

While on the one side intent on glorifying the otherworldliness of the Buddha, the Mahāsānghikas at the same time tried to increase the range of His usefulness to ordinary people. The Buddha has not disappeared into Nirvāṇa, but with a compassion as unlimited as the length of His life, He will until the end of time conjure up all kinds of messengers who will help all kinds of beings in diverse ways. His influence is not confined to those few who can understand His abstruse doctrines. As a Bodhisattva, i.e. during the very long period which precedes His Buddhahood, He is even reborn in the “states of woe”, becomes of His own free will an animal, a ghost or a dweller in hell and in many ways furthers the weal of those beings who live in conditions in which wisdom teaching must fall on deaf ears. Nor are Buddhas found on this earth alone, but they fill the entire universe, and exist here and there everywhere, in all the world systems.

Two of the philosophical theories of the Mahdsan-ghikas are of outstanding importance:

1. They taught that thought, in its own nature, its own being, in its substance, is perfectly pure and translucent. The impurities are accidental to it, never enter into or affect its original purity, and remain “adventitious” to it.

2. The Mahāsānghikas were in the course of time led to an increasing scepticism about the value of verbalized and conceptualized knowledge. Some of them taught that all worldly things are unreal, because a result of the perverted views. Only that which transcends worldly things and can be called “emptiness”, being the absence of all of them, is real. Others said that everything, both worldly and supramundane, both absolute and relative, both Samsara and Nirvāṇa, is fictitious and unreal and that all we have got is a number of verbal expressions to which nothing real corresponds. In this way the Mahāsānghikas early implanted the seeds which came to fruition in Mahāyāna Buddhism in the second period.

The second split, between the Pudgalavādins and the Sthavirās, concerned the question of pudgala, or “person”. At the beginning of their history the “Personalists” were called Vātsīputrīyas, after their founder, whereas later on they were better known as the Sammitiyas. Although barely orthodox, they were at times strong in numbers, as we can see from the fact that Yuan Tsang in the seventh century counted 66,000 Personalist monks, out of a total of 250,000 in the whole of India.

It was a fundamental dogma of Buddhist philosophy that personality is a token of falsehood and that no idea of “self, in whichever form it might appear, ought to have a place in the conception of reality as it actually is. The Personalists challenged this position and claimed that in addition to the impersonal dharmas there is still a Person to be reckoned with. They could adduce much scriptural authority in favour of their views. They were, for instance, fond of quoting the remark: “One person, when He is born in the world, is born for the weal of the many. Who is that one person? He is the Tathagata.” Their opponents had to admit these and many other passages, but they maintained that they do not mean what they say, since in them the Buddha only conformed to the linguistic usage of an ignorant world.

The Personalists on the other hand taught that the Person is a reality in the ultimate sense, which provides a common factor or link for the successive processes occuring in a self-identical individual, over many lives, up to Buddhahood. At the same time the Pudgalavadins took great care to define the relation of the Person to the skandhas in such a way as not to contradict the essential principles of the Buddha’s teaching and so as to exclude the “erroneous belief in a self. “The Person is neither identical with the skandhas, nor is he in the skandhas, nor outside them”, so they taught. He provides, as we would put it, .a kind of “structural unity” for the psycho-physical elements. As such he is “ineffable”, indefinable in every respect whatsoever. A man’s true, transcendental Self is indeed so subtle that only the Buddhas can see it.

The Pudgalavadins represented the reaction of commonsense against the improbabilities of the dharmas theory in its more uncompromising forms. They provided over the centuries a constant irritant to disputants of other sects and in some ways they were the forerunners of Mahayana philosophy. There exists a close analogy between the pudgala and the Suchness, or Emptiness, of the Madhyamikas, and the “Store-consciousness” of the Yogacarins had many of the functions which the Personalists assigned to the pudgala.

Thirdly, the split between Sarvastivadins and Vibhajyavadins was occasioned by the pan-realistic ontological doctrine of Katyayamputra, who taught that not only the present, but also past and future events are real. It appears that Aśoka sided with the Vibhajyavadins and that in consequence the Sarvastivadins went North and converted Kashmir, which remained their centre for more than a thousand years.

When we consider the basic practice of Buddhist meditation, it is not surprising that the problem of the existence of past and future events should have seemed so important. Among the unsatisfactory features of this world the pride of place belonged to impermanence and it was the task of the Yogin to impress its full extent on his mind so as to further his distaste for worldly things. In this connection he had to take an event, or dharma, and see its “rise and fall”, i.e. how it “comes, becomes, goes”.

Now, once a monk had got used to contrasting the past with the present and future, he might well become curious to know whether only the present really exists, or also the past and future. If only the present exists, this raises the further point of its duration, which many regarded as lasting just one single instant. In that case no thing will endure for any length of time, and one must assume that it is annihilated and re-created from instant to instant.

This raises difficulties not only for the commonsense, but according to Katyayamputra, also for the Buddhist doctrine of karma and retribution. For if a past action, which has ceased to exist immediately after taking place should lead to a reward or punishment many years later, then in that case something which does not exist is operative, has an effect, at a time when it does not exist. Likewise, so Katyayamputra thought, the knowledge of past and future objects, as attested by memory and prediction, would be impossible, since no knowledge is possible without an actual object in front of the mind. In consequence he evolved the pan-realistic theory, which became the peculiar thesis of the Sarvastivadins. It avoided the difficulties mentioned above, only to introduce many others in their stead and a vast superstructure of auxiliary hypotheses was required to make it tenable.

In spite of their addiction to a rather tortuous scholasticism, the Sarvastivadins became the most significant school on the Indian subcontinent.

As the result of the emergence of an interest in philosophical questions we have the first instance of a whole class of canonical literature being created to meet a new situation. The Abhidharma books were clearly composed after the third division of the schools. The contents of the seven Abhidharma books of the Sarvastivadins differ greatly from those of the seven books of the Theravadins, who are an offshoot of the Vibhajyavadins. Some sects, like the Sautrantikas, went so far as to contest the authenticity of all Abhidharma works. A great mental effort went, from about 200 BC onwards, into the production of these books, which are technical handbooks of meditation, teaching what events can be regarded as elementary, how others are composed of them, how they condition each other, etc.

Before we leave the schools, we may mention a few more points of disagreement on questions of a more general interest.

The elusive concept of Nirvāṇa came in for some discussion. If it is unconditioned, does it exist, and can it have effects? Is it the only unconditioned thing, or is space also unconditioned? Is there any difference between the Nirvāṇa of the Buddhas and that of other people, and what is it?

There was also much interest in determining the criteria of a definite achievement, which cannot again be lost. There was therefore much debate on when and whether the Arhats and other saints can “fall back” and from when onwards their salvation is assured.

On the subject of death, always present in the minds of these ascetics, one wondered whether the hour of death is definitely fixed by karma, or whether a premature and untimely death is possible.

There was also disagreement on what follows on death: five schools believed that death is instantly followed by rebirth in another organism, whereas five other schools taught that death would be followed by an “intermediary existence” of up to forty-nine days, during which in most cases the new incarnation slowly prepared itself. In the case of certain saints this interval is used for the attainment of the Nirvāṇa which escaped them during this life.

5. THE LAITY

We have now sketched the basic opinions and aims of the homeless monks who constitute the essential core of the Buddhist world. But what about those Buddhists who were not monks, what about the laity without whom the monks could not possibly carry on their meditations? What is their place in the scheme of things? What are they given to do? And what do the monks do for them?

If a layman feels tied to his home and unable to escape from it into the homeless life, it is due to his deficiency in a quality called “merit”, which depends on what he has done in the past and which circumscribes his access to spiritual opportunities. A number of exceptional cases are recorded of laymen having won deathlessness without previously entering the Order. Generally speaking, however, their salvation is out of the question at present, and can be assured only on condition that by a future life they have accumulated sufficient “merit” to make the jump into the social freedom of the monastic life.

The layman’s one and only religious task at present can be to increase his store of merit. The Buddhist religion offers him four avenues for doing so:

a. He must observe the five precepts, or at least some of them. On feast days, every fortnight, he may add to them another three, i.e. he fasts, avoids worldly amusements, and uses neither unguents nor ornaments. A few observed still two more precepts, i.e. they did not sleep on a high, big bed and they accepted no gold or silver.

b. He must have devotion for the Three Treasures and faith is the virtue apposite to a householder’s state of life. But this faith is not an exclusive one and does not entail a rejection of his ancestral beliefs and of the Brahmanic religious usages of his social environment. The Triple Jewel is not a jealous God and is not displeased by the worship of the deities of a man’s country or caste.

c. He must be generous, especially to the monks, and give as much as possible to them, not only for their upkeep, but also for religious buildings inhabited by no one. To some extent the merit produced by gifts depends on the spiritual endowments of the recipient, and therefore the sons of Sakyamuni, and in particular the Arhats, are the best possible “field for planting merit”.

d. He may worship the relics of the Buddha. The actual attitude of the Buddhists to these teeth and bones is difficult to describe in terms readily understood in the West. It is obviously impossible for them to “pray” to the Buddha, for the reason that He is no longer there, being in Nirvāṇa, i.e. extinct as far as this world is concerned. It is even doubtful whether the word “worship” is a very suitable one. Before the advent of modern industrialism men everywhere looked upon the world as a mysterious realm of boundless possibilities, full of invisible forces, meaningful and replete with significant hints. The posture of namaskara, in which the folded extended palms are held forth, is the customary mode of greeting in India. Bigotry, servility and superstitious idolatry do not enter into it. All these things rest very lightly on the true believer and do not constrain his inner freedom. The fervour of the faithful filled the Buddhist world with innumerable shrines (caitya) and Stupas, which became the object of the special devotion of householders. The creation and cult of Buddha images is, however, fairly late, and unlikely to go back before the first century AD.

If a layman well observes these four duties, he will be happy in this life, and after his death he will be reborn in heaven, or in paradise. The Emperor Aśoka well exemplifies the character of Buddhism as understood by the laity. Among Buddhist doctrines he regarded as the two most important ones the avoiding of doing harm to others (ahirhsa) and the active benevolence towards them (maitri). His edicts contain many moral exhortations to the practice of the simple virtues and we also hear much about the need for piety. But there is nothing in them about the deeper ideas or fundamental tenets of the faith. There is no mention of the four holy Truths, the eightfold path, the chain of causation, or even of Nirvāṇa, or of the supernatural qualities of a Buddha.

What benefits then does the monk bestow upon the laymen? He increases both their spiritual and their material welfare.

He promotes the first by sermons on those aspects of the doctrine which are intelligible and relevant to the laity, as well as by the example of a holy life which will give courage and zest to those still tied to the world and can give them a glimpse of the freedom and serenity they may achieve in a future life.

In the course of time a vast literature of Birth stories (jataka), which tell of the Buddha’s previous lives, animal as well as human, and of edifying tales (avadana) was composed for the benefit of the laity. These stories were listened to with avidity, but they had less authority than the more metaphysical teachings. Their message concerns chiefly the virtues of secular life. They constantly stress the doctrine of karma and rebirth and also foster a tenderness towards all that lives. In Bharhut, Bodhgaya, San-chi, Nagarjunikonda and Ajanta many of the Jataka tales have been illustrated in sculpture and painting.

It was also a belief of Buddhist Asia that the material well-being of the people, their economic prosperity and their freedom from famine, epidemics and wars, was largely the work of the monks. For the welfare of a nation depends chiefly on the benevolence of occult and spiritual forces, which the monks alone can know about and which they alone can propitiate. All is well with a people which respects the monks, showing its reverence for the Buddhas by generous gifts to the monasteries and for temples and shrines, but a nation which turns its back on the religion is doomed to perish in misery. These were the beliefs which helped to maintain the monastic institutions.

The voluntary and sporadic support of a population tied to them by links as tenuous as these would, however, not have kept the Order going for long. The secret behind its social survival over the centuries lay in the ability of the Buddhists, repeated over and over again, to enlist the support of Asian rulers, who maintained the monastic institutions out of government funds. In default of this, the monks were driven to become large property owners in their own right and to dispense altogether with the capricious rewards of begging from house to house. This is also a solution, but it imperils aloofness from the things of this world and is apt to draw the monks back into the arena of social strife.

Nevertheless relations with the laity were always precarious and there at its base was the Achilles heel of the whole soaring edifice. If Buddhism departed from the tenets of the first period, it was largely the work of the laity. It was their pressure which did much to bring about the reforms of the second and third period, reforms which therefore appeared to the strict monastic party as a degeneration. The Mahay ana gave much greater weight to the laymen. It could count on much popular support for its opinion that people are as important as dharmas, for its attacks on the selfishness of monks who think only of their own welfare, for its constant censure of “haughty” and “conceited” monks and for its stories of wealthy householders, such as Vimalaklrti, who surpassed the oldest and most venerable monks in the splendour of their spiritual attainments. The same kind of popular pressure would induce the monks to become more manifestly useful to laymen.

In the third, Tan-trie, period they inserted themselves into their magical beliefs and acted as astrologers, exercisers, weather makers, doctors, etc. That is why the story of Buddhism becomes unintelligible unless due weight is given to the desires of the dumb common people. The stone which the builders had rejected became the cornerstone after all.

6. EXPANSION

During this period Buddhism remained on the whole a purely Indian religion. The emperor Aśoka, about 250 BC, sent some missions to the successors of Alexander the Great, i.e. to the Greek kingdoms of the diadochs in Egypt, Macedon, Cyrene and Epirus. These missions have left no trace and they may very well have been ineffective.

The rather dim awareness of Buddhism which we find in Greek authors can be accounted for by later contacts which took place in connection with the trade which flourished in Roman times between India and the Mediterranean.

It was only in Ceylon that Aśoka’s missionary activity bore fruit. Once brought there about 240 BC by Mahinda, Aśoka’s son, Buddhism has existed in Ceylon for a longer stretch of time than anywhere else. From that time onwards Buddhism has been the state religion of Ceylon. Only Buddhists had a legitimate right to be kings and the island of Lanka was held to belong to the Buddha Himself. It was the king’s duty to protect the Order of monks and great benefits accrued to the monasteries in the form of donations, prestige and protection from interference. The kings, although mostly laymen, were also the final judges in any dispute which might arise among the Buddhists. The monks in their turn generally helped the kings and won popular support for their wishes.

This close connection of the Sańgha with the state had its disadvantages. From the second century BC onwards it not only infused a spirit of nationalism into the Buddhism of Ceylon and made the monks prone to political intrigue, but it also led them to enthusiastically support the national wars of their kings. They assured king Dutta Gamani (101-77 BC) that the killing of many thousands of enemies was of no account, because as unbelievers they were really no more than animals. They accompanied the army of the same king, “since the sight of bhikkhus is both blessing and protection for us”, and the king himself had a relic of the Buddha put into his spear.

For a long time Ceylonese Buddhists continued to be in lively contact with India over the ports of Bharukaccha and Sur-paraka in the West. Gradually the whole Canon came to Ceylon and towards the end of our period, or even later, also new works composed in Pali in India by the mother-sect, such as the first part of the “Questions of King Milinda” and the “Nid-desa”. During the first century BC the Canon and Commentaries, so far transmitted orally, were written down at Aluvi-hara, “so that the Dharma might endure”.

War and famine had depopulated the country and the oral transmission of the Pitakas was in danger. The holy language of the Canon was Pāli, whereas the Commentaries were in Sinhalese.

Ceylon became the home of a school known as the Theravādins - of great interest in the history of Buddhism partly because their Canon is preserved in its entirety and partly because in their geographical isolation they remained relatively unaffected by many of the later developments. It is not, however, very clear what Continental school they were derived from. Probably they were akin to the Indian Vibhajyavadins, and an offshoot of one of their branches.

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